I thought it was utter shite. Got terrible reviews and I can see why.

Shame as its subject matter was very interesting.

@General Lighting 548021 wrote:

Also the North Sea is not a pleasant place to be on board ship in poor weather.

It’s not too bad if there’s a bar with music and the ship has stabilisers fitted.

@Pat McDonald 548042 wrote:

It’s not too bad if there’s a bar with music and the ship has stabilisers fitted.

I’ve heard from a few in the know that booze was actually rationed (as much due to logistics of getting it aboard) – and seen on film that though they did have proper old school pirate style barrels hoist aloft, they didn’t contain grog but the top unscrewed and inside were spools of tape (180mm spool or 7″, about an hours worth of programme material) on which news and adverts were delivered). Veronica and Noordzee [1] had the shelves on which the tapes were kept angled with a wooden lip added to the front, so the tapes would not be tipped out as the vessel encountered rough seas.

a fair amount of cannabis was tolerated provided the ship wasn’t seen as part of a obvious smuggling route or that mainstream journalists found out (this happened once with Caroline, a block was put in a parcel with a spare quartz for the transmitter. BRT (Belgium radio and TV) were filming and someone thought it would be a good idea to show the quartz to the camera crew (normally its locked up in the TX room behind metal panels as there’s about 10 000 V live busbars and all sorts else in there, plus the RF would have made even a Nagra tape recorder lose its speed regulation – no portable video in those days, news was made on movie film and the sound recorded separately on the same type of tape used in the radio station but on a smaller 130mm (5″ spool).

Unfortunately whoever was showing the quartz to the journos forgot about the extra contents and the block of hash ended up being accidentally tipped out on deck.

By the 80s Laser 558 would have someone in London get the 7″ vinyl singles and copy them to NAB carts which worked far better on board ship.

Here are some pics of the equipment mentioned for the benefit of younger folk who might never have seen it.

this is a Nagra. you will still pay near €400 even for a half knackered one.

One more commonly used by both film makers and radio journalists (being cheaper) was the UHER report

both were usually loaded with 8 LR20 cells (12V) and carried across the shoulder. they were heavy and bulky, and needed careful maintenance to avoid the resulting recording sounding rough.
the current Ross Revenge

NAB cartridges and players (they used the same tape in the spools, and operated at 19 cm/s (7.5 ips)) which was acceptable quality for broadcast

a cart player stack

today you can do portable recording on pocket size kit and play thousands of tracks from a computer, and its affordable even to teenagers and 20-somethings. So I personally cannot understand excessive nostalgia for the “old days..” (I still wouldn’t mind a Nagra though)